Love for Our Fellow Man
By Bassett
LOVE to our fellow man is essential to a manly character. The duties of justice between man and the spirit of universal brotherhood, are manifest dictates of the human constitution; and when man violates these principles, he so far forth ceases to be human and approaches the character of spirits and beasts of prey. The relation of mutual dependence and essential equality, which characterizes the race, stamps its destiny in this respect. "No man liveth to himself," and obeys the laws of his being; and he who lives a life of supreme selfishness lives in violation of the laws that are written upon his constitution, and he experiences all the melancholy consequences of transgression. His heart is withered, his moral sense blunted, and his whole spiritual nature vitiated. Look at the selfish world. Man rioting upon the blood and bones of his fellow! Is this manly? Is it the dictate of human constitution? Is man really a beast of prey? Has God furnished him with the mean selfishness of the wolf? the sly deception and trickery of the fox? and the fatal poison of the adder, that he should go about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour? Whence this divine sense of justice, and those celestial promptings of benevolence and generosity? Ah; man was made to be the brother, and not the tyrant and robber of his fellow man. Those fraternal promptings of his unsophisticated nature are unmistakable. They utter plainly the voice of nature's God.—Bassett.